In
June 2007, I began teaching poetry to inmates through Auburn University's
Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project (APAEP). Over the course of 7 months,
I taught at Bibb County Correctional Facility in Brent, AL and St. Clair
Correctional Facility in Springville, AL.

On
the first day of classes at Bibb, myself and two colleagues pulled into the
visitor's parking lot. It was a hot day—ninety-degree temperatures with
unforgiving humidity. Carrying my see-through milk crate of teaching materials
bulging out the sides, it was evident that I'd over-prepared for class. We were
escorted by prison security guards through two check points, asked for our
identification cards, and personal belongings like keys, jewelry, and currency.
We were padded down, checked for weapons of destruction, our stuff sent through
a metal detector. There were monitors. (As I write this, I'm bothered by the
ease with which this story is coming to me. As if my experience was comparable
to a TV documentary on prisons. You know, the kind that generate popular
distrust and contempt for inmates, and by association, neutralize one's sense
of alarm over the general malignancy of state punishment by inviting us to view
its organization—a system of monitoring, uniformed and armed security
officials, buffed and shined floors, check points, etc.). In Michel Foucault's
book Discipline and Punish, the theorist describes this organized
monitoring as the panoptic process–a machine that functions to induce in
the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the
automatic functioning of power. We could have likely been at an airport or
hospital with all the security measures. That's a scary thought.

We
finally ended up in a large, air-conditioned room. It was surrounded by windows
that fanned out to the prison yard. Brown lawns were evidence of Alabama's
drought. Thirty-foot tall fences crowned with barbed wire ran the length of the
facility. A security tower. Many brick dormitories with barely opened, steel
slats. Inside the meeting hall, a handful of inmates dressed in dingy-white,
dickey-type uniforms sat waiting along a rear wall. Chairs hugged the walls in
stacks. I claimed the corner farthest away from my colleagues hoping this would
mitigate the acoustics in the room. Three classes of 20 inmates occupying the
same space. With the help of my students, we set up our classroom: 15 chairs
and two long tables facing south.

If
I was nervous, the feeling dissipated once class begun. There was a sense that
I had work to do here with this group and myself, and that could only be done
in this context. I'd had two brothers serve time in state penitentiaries in
Georgia. Thus, my stint teaching at Bibb seemed near-intimate and personal.

Bibb
County Correctional Facility is home to some 1, 400 inmates most of whom are
non-violent drug offenders. This is sharply contrasted with St. Clair
Correctional Facility where in a prison with a capacity for 1,300 inmates, over
300 are serving life without parole. A recent 2008 study from the Pew Center on
the States purports that the United States leads the world in its prison
population with more than 23 million people behind bars as compared to China's
1.5 million and Russia's 890,000. Throw race in there and it becomes a ball of
wax. It is no surprise that the history of slavery with its focus on the
unlawful revocation of basic human rights for Americans, the large majority of
which are African Americans, has its tie to the current system of incarceration
which produces the ideology of racial subordination by imprisoning a
disproportionate number of black and brown males at an alarming rate. One study
suggests that 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs born in the late
1960s are imprisoned before the age of 40. On average, state inmates have fewer
than 11 years of schooling and come from disadvantaged parts of society.

When
I took the job with APAEP, I had no plans to write the poem under consideration.
Together my students and I read essays by Sterling Brown on the mnemonics of
sacred and secular music in African American verse traditions along with essays
on the Reconstruction period in American History by W.E.B. Dubois. We examined
song lyrics by Bob Dylan.We read
innovators like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman as well as contemporary poets
like Ilya Kaminsky and Honoree Fannone Jeffers. We talked about current events.
Our discussions laid the groundwork for many of the poems we'd write in
class.Each inmate kept a daily
dream diary or journal. I encouraged them to use the material from their
journals as fodder for poems.

In the same way that Langston Hughes's
or Sterling Brown's work embodies the vernacular of African American culture,
in this long poem Alabama Inmate Notes (for Moses), I set out to gather an impression of the vernacular of life
behind bars.